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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how the collapse of the maritime infrastructure gave rise to new informal economic practices in Poti, Georgia and elucidates how reforms aimed at negotiating the sea triggered resistance from affected communities, challenging the state's efforts to regulate maritime affairs.

Paper long abstract:

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution, the vibrant maritime infrastructure in Poti, a pivotal port city in Georgia, collapsed, prompting the emergence of informal economic practices among locals to sustain their connections to the sea and its resources. From the 1990s onwards, fishing and the collection of 'remnants of the Empire' evolved into indispensable survival strategies for those who found themselves unemployed during the tumultuous transition from a socialist economy. These practices established through hard work throughout the years were dramatically altered by the reforms introduced after the "Rose Revolution" in 2003. Focusing on the revolutionary government's reforms aimed at negotiating the sea between private fishing companies and local fishers, the study examines how these state-driven initiatives subjected the sea to capitalist logic, resulting in the disenfranchisement of local communities from their traditional maritime resource rights. Addressing questions such as "Who holds the right to the sea?" and "How can the state tame the sea?" the research scrutinises the consequences of sea-grabbing for communities reliant on maritime resources. The analysis reveals that governmental intervention spurred the emergence of new informal economic practices among local communities as a strategic response to reclaim their rights to the sea. Contrary to the anticipated outcome of fostering successful entrepreneurship, these reforms triggered protests and resistance from affected communities, challenging the state's efforts to regulate and dominate maritime activities.

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This first presentation introduces the themes and conceptualisation of the panel: Why we want to think human and non-human mobility, sea grabs, and their concomitant regulations together; Why we chose claiming and movements as a key terms; What a view from the sea offers anthropological thinking

Paper long abstract:

If anthropology were to burn, the sea is already on fire. Due to warming water, oceans are experiencing mass exodus of marine life and species “out of place.” While mobile species and migrant humans claim rights to belong elsewhere via the ocean, states, corporations, and environmental organizations lay their own claims: as a space of movement, capital accumulation, extractivism, and sea-grabbing, the sea becomes the front stage for new forms of expansion, control and bordering practices. Focusing on disparate movements currently unfolding in our oceans: human and non-human mobility, sea grabs, and their concomitant regulations, this panel traces nativist, capitalist and colonial legacies in anthropology and beyond.

Approached as archives of the past, oceanscapes and sealives provide new stories about the world we inherited from the colonial era. Through this colonial framework, early anthropology was dominated by a terracentric and anthropocentric gaze, viewing humans and non-humans as sedentary subjects. While the 1990s “mobility turn” challenged this paradigm when it came to humans, oceans continued to be treated as transit spaces, not as social worlds made up by moving people and sea creatures. Water cannot easily be fenced, owned, territorialized or captured. A focus on attempts to regulate and control the sea, mobilites and resources through governance or ocean grabs teaches us how the logics of capture and control underpinning colonialism and capitalism have been premised on the qualities of land, and are being rescripted for the element of water.

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Drawing on years of fieldwork aboard and involvement in sea-centered movements of solidarity this paper impresses that indigenous-led practices that engage contemporary oceans relate directly to the politics of radical social change and the question of anticolonialism today.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on years of research, fieldwork on board and active involvement in sea-centered movements of solidarity in the Mediterranean, including efforts to challenge the embargo in Gaza and to support border-crossing refugees, this presentation impresses that indigenous-led practices that engage contemporary oceans can be rethought in ways that relate directly to the politics of radical social change and, in particular, the question of anticolonialism today.

In other words, to analyze these practices within conventional liberal-moralist frameworks, such as humanitarianism, piracy, terrorism, is to miss their anticolonial insurgent spirit. Denying indigenous agency and insurgent agendas, liberal presentism restores the West both as global operational center for the control of the oceans and as universal moral horizon. Often, it subsumes insurgent movements under the ephemeral and superficial trope of crisis (“refugee crisis”, “red sea crisis”) which effectively disconnects them from a long history of struggles against Empire and its maritime manifestations (embargoes, borders, interceptions).

The question that emerges is thus: How can we move past the techno-moral geographies of Empire in analyzing sea-centered indigenous praxis? Can we rethink solidarity at sea through an anticolonial lens? And to what effect? Venturing a response, I explore through a unified and comparative perspective four instances of indigenous-led insurgent practice at sea during the last 10-15 years: The Ships to Gaza, the border-crossing refugee boats, contemporary Somali piracy, and the recent Yemeni rebels’ attacks on Israel-bound ships around the Gulf of Aden.

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Paper short abstract:

Since 2014 various civil SAR NGOs have started to go at sea to support people on the move crossing towards Europe from Northafrican coasts. Freedom of movement struggles often intertwine with humanitarian logics ending up in a depoliticization process. How to focus on forms of maritime radicalism?

Paper long abstract:

Based on a etnographic field work carried out between 2019 and 2024 on board of different Search and Rescue civil ships in the central mediterranean, the paper focuses on the believes and the practices of the activists on board of such ships. Political and militant background meant to empower people on the move often overlaps or smashes against emergencial and assistential behaviours that victimise the rescuees.

How does the specific maritime context affect the humanitarian and political "currents" intertwined on board? How the sea can allow us to re-think concepts as anti-nativism, border violence, freedom of chioice and of movement, looking at them from a ship?

The materiality of the sea changes the relation between political groups and the State, the management of burocracy and practical action. Furthermore, the different sovreignities overlapping at sea (betwwen territorial water, SAR areas, ZEE areas etc.) create a new context in which investigate health and disease of the contemporary Nation States.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper makes visible the links between how governance regimes and conceptualisations of fish travelled via the complex machinations of European imperialism and worldviews, and the imposition of these regimes onto marine relationships.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act 2011 and the Māori commercial aquaculture Act 2004, I interrogate the contested development of marine governance in Aotearoa/New Zealand. These legal recognitions evolved as concessions to Indigenous challenges regarding the growth of marine farming in seascapes of special significance to Māori, though are directed towards different ends: the settlement of Māori claims to commercial aquaculture incorporates Māori into the national aquaculture business development framework, whereas the Marine and Coastal Area Act concerns the protection of ancestral cultural practices and marine title in the foreshore and seabed area. Underpinning both, however, is a dichotomisation of Indigenous marine relations into cultural and economic spheres, conservationist and blue growth framings; bordering dynamics which work to both hierarchise cross-cutting flows of kin relatedness in Māori social organisation and institutionalise new forms of marine territorialisation. Drawing on ethnographic research with coastal Māori tribes, I suggest that an Indigenous ability to border cross categories of social difference references the radical potential of kinship to challenge the generation of marine inequality in the context of environmental demise.

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This media paper explores Italy’s system of reception for asylum seekers during the COVID pandemic and the embarkation of people onto quarantine boats. The paper is interwoven with excerpts — underwater footage, hydrophone and field recordings— from my recent film Il naufragio inizia da qui.

Paper long abstract:

Through the conceptual lens of a shipwreck society the film starts from protests in the seaside town of Amantea, Calabria, where a group of people locked down in a “reception centre” contracted covid. The protest had the intention of interning the group onto quarantine vessels — repurposed cruise ships. During a period in which solidarity at sea and on land is under assault, the film explores how a nationalist imaginary of detention aspires to return those who arrive to seek refuge by boat, under precarious conditions, back to the sea and to the risk of shipwreck once more. Under the auspices of a system of hospitality the sea becomes a space of floating detention and incarceration.

Adapting the eco-pedagogical phrase “Il mare inizia da qui” (the sea starts here), the two-channel film uses disjunctures of sound and image to produce an immersion in the sea whilst on land and on the land from the position of the sea. With these disjunctures I will reflect on how different actors – asylum seekers and activists challenging detention practices – perceive their relationship with the sea. I ask whether it is also possible to say that from the land ‘il naufragio inizia da qui’? or does the shipwreck start here?

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This paper explores the interconnections between the transnational exploitation of Senegal’s fish and the migration of young Senegalese by sea to Spain. Placing the ocean at the center of the analysis, it examines how certain lives are produced as economically valuable but unworthy of protection.

Paper long abstract:

With 700 kilometers of coastline, Senegal’s culture and economy are intimately connected to the ocean. Fish crowns the country’s most iconic dish, cëebu jën, and the country itself is said to be named after the traditional fishing boat: the gaal, or pirogue. Nowadays, however, traditional fishers’ catch is dwindling, and pirogues are increasingly used not to go fishing but to make the dangerous sea journey to the Spanish Canary Islands. Spain is the destination not only of disenchanted youths – many of them fishermen and others from coastal areas – but also of a large share of the fish caught in their country’s waters by large, industrial trawlers that locals blame for the decimation of fish banks. Once in Spain, however, migrants are less welcome than their fish: some are deported; many are given unfulfilled expulsion orders and effectively irregularised: allowed to stay without formal authorization nor rights to reside or work, thus vulnerable to precarity and labour exploitation. Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal and Spain, and situating at the core of the analysis the ocean’s duality as source of life and loss, space of closure and connection, this paper examines how value, exclusion and exploitability are produced in the Anthropocene. It explores how certain lives (human, oceanic) are produced as worthy of economic exploitation, but not of rights and protection. The oceanic waters from which both fish and migrants originate serves a prism through which to analyse the interconnections between the exploitation of nature and humans.

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Paper short abstract:

The turbulent materiality of the blue crab in Tunisia provides a pretext to explore the cultural and social dynamics emerging from the disruptive era of ecological globalization. l weave adaptation-protection-exploitation as a lens to critically reflect on the oceanic world as a space of conquest.

Paper long abstract:

The blue crab (Callictenus sapidus and Portunus pelagicus) is one of the most well-known invaders of the last decade. Likely transported to the Mediterranean Sea via ballast water from Atlantic Ocean cargo ships and through the opening of the Suez Canal connecting the Indian Ocean, its presence, facilitated by the better-known tropicalization of the Mediterranean, is viewed as a threat to biodiversity and economies, thus carrying deep social and cultural dimensions.

Tunisia, perhaps among the first states to act against this disruptive presence – local fishermen call it 'Dā'ish' like the Islamic State due to its size and danger – has, over nine years, established an export chain for the crustacean's meat worldwide, especially in contexts like Asia where the blue crab is a delicacy. However, reality is more complex and layered than it may seem, and only an immersive investigation and ethnography, as the author is conducting in the southern North African country, can highlight its various facets. The Gulf of Gabes, one of the most polluted in this context where the crab is the only survivor, is a particularly fertile field to explore turbulent materialities in the era of accelerated change.

In this proposal, I ponder: how are local communities, often engaged in artisanal fishing practices, reacting to this new presence? How have new seascapes formed in these territories? How has science constructed apocalyptic imaginaries about this invasion? And what cultural and social processes have intertwined among humans, non-humans, and the sea?

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Paper short abstract:

The central Mediterranean is full of monsters. Recently, the arrival of blue crabs has added one more name to the list of sea monsters. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Sicily, this paper explores the intersections between monstrosity, more-than-human mobility, and claiming the sea.

Paper long abstract:

The central Mediterranean is full of monsters. From the Strait of Messina, where Scylla and Charybdis prevent sailors from crossing the three kilometers from Calabria to Sicily, to the coastal waters off of Mazara del Vallo, where mythical creatures and archaeological treasures together populate the sea floor, chthonic ones make their homes in waters surrounding Sicily. Recently, the arrival of a new crustacean has added one more name to the dramatis personae of sea monsters: the blue crab. Differing from other sea monsters in its edibility, the blue crab – with its often-cannibalistic hunger, almost legendary status, and propensity for destroying fishing nets – is figured monstrously as an alien invader from distant shores.

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Sicily, this paper explores the intersections between monstrosity, more-than-human mobility, and claiming the sea. Following Musharbash’s (2021) call to pay attention to the monsters “who are part and parcel of social life,” this paper thinks through the concept of monstrosity. Where monsters like Scylla and the sirens disrupt or prey upon human mobility, mobile species are monstrous precisely because of their mobility. In considering the arrival of blue crabs in a sea that is already of monsters, this paper argues that the representation of mobile species as monsters highlights assumptions of non-human sedentarism that unruly and moving species disrupt, as these monstrous moving species claim the sea in ways that are both out of human control and counter to human projects.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper “Tuna Troubles” asks how the development of fish ranches and farms make and unmake Atlantic bluefin tuna and what this does and undoes to this "torpedo from the ocean depths" and its relationship with space, water, and time.

Paper long abstract:

In its contribution to the “Claiming the sea, seaing anthropology” panel, I propose to present a view from a tuna ranch, which is another way to say cage, off of the coast of Malta and submerged by the Mediterranean Sea. This “sea view” takes a deep breath to bob above and then snorkel below the surface of the water, to swim clockwise in the company of Atlantic bluefin, to hitch a ride on what feels like an underwater merry-go-round that rewrites the song “Hotel California” for the Anthropocene. The lyrics jumble. Instead of champagne on ice, there is tuna frozen in such a flash that it still counts as fresh, but the same doubts remain—about what is heaven versus hell, about steely knives and the master’s chambers, about checking-out without being able to leave. Doubts that become questions about the multiple meanings of more-than-human mobilities and how profit-driven practices like tuna ranching try to tether bluefin to one place while conservation-conscious regulations that follow the meridian 45° west attempt to adhere to a line that fish and currents and water alike all ignore. In dialogue with how the logics of capture that fuel contemporary ocean grabs adapt colonialism’s script to water, “Tuna Troubles” weaves together an intimate study of tuna—what Pablo Neruda calls a “torpedo from the ocean depths, a missile that swam”—with scholarship about how regulations make and unmake, do and undo fish and their relationships with water (Probyn 2016; Telesca 2020; Pinchen 2023).